


Soulmate Theory for Dummies

by piffle



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes is kinda dumb, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-19
Updated: 2016-09-19
Packaged: 2018-08-16 02:55:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8083975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piffle/pseuds/piffle
Summary: The thing about soul marks is, there’s no manual.  Sure, some guy buried in some government office is probably working on one right now, compiling potential laws and outlining potential rules detailing the properties they think exist as he sips his cold coffee and shivers under the air conditioning, but that guy’s job is the definition of a dead-end. It’s a dead-end because the moment someone thinks they know something about a mark, someone else, somewhere else, proves them wrong.





	

The thing is, everything was going fine until the arm broke.

Sure, the world was changed, broken apart and reassembled a thousand times over, sometimes by his hands but mostly by the hands of others now that he’d come in from the cold, and Bucky’s come to grips with that.He still wakes up sometimes in the darkness of the apartment that’s his and no one else’s, wild-eyed and afraid, his hands a rictus about an invisible human neck - which is, as he thinks later, so much like the shape of the world if you don’t know what he’d meant by it - but mostly he sleeps and has the kind of boring, repetitive dreams that his psychiatrist says is his brain trying to put things into an order that makes sense.

Steve had tried to help him with that once, when Bucky had made the mistake of telling him about the dreams.He and Bucky and Sam had lost an entire afternoon quibbling about the way Steve used to (and still does) tie his shoes, and after that they’d silently decided never to talk about it again.

There are a lot of things they don’t talk about, actually.Things like Bucky having his own apartment, or the old Brooklyn, or the mark on Bucky’s long gone arm that Steve had given him when the two of them were five years old and still knew what it was like to give something to someone without knowing why.

Steve still has his mark, of course.But they don’t talk about that, either.

Sam asked about it a total of one time, because Sam always brings a thing up once before allowing Bucky to lay it to rest, like an antique he thinks Bucky hasn’t already turned over in his hands a hundred thousand times before deciding once and for all to pack it away.

“You ever wonder about it?” he’d said that one day, sitting at Bucky’s tiny two person table with his feet stretched so far into Bucky’s space it was like he was _trying_ to be obnoxious. “Why it’s that color, what it means?”

Bucky had said no, because to him it’s a stupid question.Of course he’d wondered about it.He’d wondered about it his entire life and never come any closer to any kind of answer for wondering, and Bucky, he figures it’s about time to just leave it be.

See, the thing about soul marks is, people have them.They don’t lose them.

Bucky thinks he knows what’s at the heart of the question, anyway, and he’s pretty sure it doesn’t have anything to do with the great mystery of it, or even Bucky’s feelings about losing it.It’s about Sam, and Steve, and the  green of the marks they’d given each other.It’s about Sam assuming it would bother Bucky that Steve went out and got a live-in boyfriend while Bucky was supposed to be dead, but was actually out in the world murdering women and children and generally being a menace to society at large.

But it’s not about Bucky.Not _everything_ is about Bucky.

And he doesn’t care, not really.Peggy’s mark only started fading a year after her funeral, and that it’s now just a rosy bloom doesn’t give him any kind of comfort in the same way that seeing Sam’s bold as brass doesn’t cause him any kind of pain.It’s actually sort of a relief, not that he’d ever let Sam know. Let the guy sweat it.

So anyway, they don’t talk about the mark, or Bucky’s lack thereof, and they mostly don't talk about Steve’n’Sam, or Sam’n’Steve, but that’s just because Bucky doesn’t give two shits and Steve’s about as emotionally developed as a salad fork.And if them not talking about those things is a problem, then, well, Bucky considers himself lucky. 

He’s had worse problems, is the point.If this is the kind of thing he thinks of as a problem, then things are going just fine.

 

* * *

 

“You have an underdeveloped concept of ‘fine,’” is what Natasha tells him one day while they’re supposed to be shopping for a birthday present for Clint, but are really just trolling around the mall sucking on Orange Juliuses and shooting the shit. 

Bucky likes the mall.He likes shopping for things without buying them, and flipping coins into water fountains, and watching teenagers hang out while they talk about things other than going to war.

Natasha likes it, too.She says that very little gives her more pleasure than spending the money she’s siphoned off psychopaths and corrupt governments on expensive clothing she’ll probably never wear.She makes Bucky come with her at least once a week.

“No, I don’t,” Bucky says, watching her pin a blue dress to her hips that reminds him of something she may have worn in another life, in a different country, when both she and he were different people that meant different things to each other. “‘Fine’ is somewhere between ‘great’ and ‘lousy.’ Just above ‘eh,’ and right below ‘can’t complain.’”

Natasha rolls her eyes and shoves the dress at him before selecting another, this one dark and deadly looking, just like her.

“‘Fine’ is what unhappy people say they are when they don’t know or won’t admit they’re unhappy,” she says. 

Bucky frowns, studying the  blue mark around her wrist that’s as faded as his memory of giving it to her and says, “I thought we were shopping for Clint.”

The same little smile she’d given him while he’d chased her through D.C. is on Natasha’s lips when she slides the dress off its hanger and opens the door to the dressing room.

She doesn’t even say anything. Just smiles that little smile and lets Bucky stand there like a dope while she tries on dress after dress, each one lovelier than the last, but not one of them anything he would have chosen for her. 

Not now, but not then, either.

The thing about soul marks is, they never disappear.They accumulate.So, when Bucky wakes up in the morning and eats his breakfast, or while he’s washing his hair, or watering his plants, or feeding his cat, they’re all supposed to be there. No matter who, or where, or when he was when he got them. _His_ soul marks.

Sometimes, before he tries to sleep for the night in his bed alone, Bucky pulls back his shirt and examines the half-moon of three fingers Natasha had left at the curve where his neck meets the shoulder he got to keep.She was a different woman with a different name, then. 

Bucky got to pick his name up after he’d dropped it.Brush it off, pin it back on himself like a rose.Good as new.

He guesses he’s lucky.

 

* * *

 

So, the arm.For a piece of hardware with lots of moving parts, it doesn’t malfunction all that often. It’s been _his_ arm for awhile now, even if the amount of time since he’s accepted it as his isn’t much to brag about, no matter what Sam says, so Bucky feels that it’s probably a good thing he knows how to troubleshoot. Do field repairs.Clean out the plates and put ‘em back in without getting one backwards.

Steve had to help him one time.Problem with Steve is, he might have the most dexterous hands and the best intentions of any man on the planet, but he he doesn’t know a damn thing about machines. Bucky asked him once what he’d do if his bike broke down, and the guy had looked at him like he didn’t know such a thing was even possible.

Rogers. Shit.

Having the arm is a bit like having the cat, though.Bucky knows how to clean her litter box and trim her nails, he knows where she likes to be pet, and where not to touch her.She got a thorn stuck in her paw once and he had to take it out with a pair of tweezers, a task that had turned out to be a lot more dangerous than many of his missions as the Winter Soldier.They’d nearly lost an eye between them, and she’d hid under the bed for two days before coming out for her favorite treats.

But really, all that stuff, even the thorn, that was just maintenance. If she got sick, if she got _really_ sick, he’d have to take her to a vet.Same thing with the arm, only it’s a lot harder to find a mechanic with the experience and security clearance necessary to pull it off than it is to find a good veterinarian. 

“You should go see Stark,” Steve says to him a few days after the arm made a horrible grinding sound and locked down with the elbow at a 90 degree angle. 

They’re sitting on the deserted patio of a busy cafe in Soho eating burgers stuffed with coleslaw while the wind, herald of an oncoming storm, beats at their napkins and Bucky’s hooded head. 

Steve’s hatless, of course - he never did have much sense - but if anything, the wind’s doing nothing more to Steve’s hair than what Bucky would if given half the chance, but Bucky hasn’t touched Steve since 1944 and he doesn’t plan to start now.

Bucky chews, looking at Steve from under his eyebrows.It’s his opinion that Tony Stark is a louder, more annoying version of his father, who Bucky had never really liked in the first place.Sure, he and Stark have worked together on occasion, but nearest Bucky’s ever seen him is from across a city block as he covered the guy’s six, and that was with Stark in the suit.They’ve never interacted _socially_.

“It wouldn’t _be_ social, Buck,” Steve says, setting down what remains of his burger and looking at Bucky like he thinks Bucky could stand to be a little more social. “Trust me, once he lays eyes on that arm, you’ll be lucky if he even gives you the time of day.”

Bucky slumps a bit more, taking a surly swallow of his iced tea, the doing of which is about as ridiculous as it sounds.Steve’s always calling it _that arm_ , or _the arm_ , or _that thing_ , and sometimes, on days like today when everything already seems to have gone sour, it makes Bucky want to rip it off and beat Steve with it.

He thinks of the kind of blunt instrument the arm would make, all awkward and flexed as it is, and says he’ll think about it.

 

* * *

 

He does think about it, a little.Mostly, he makes do, strapping his arm to his chest and doing everything in the most cumbersome, right-handed way possible.He’s ambidextrous by birth, but he never realized just how little that means when forced to use only his right hand for daily activities. 

It’s a pain in the ass, is what it is.

Everything has to be broken into two or more steps. He starts drinking from the carton again, just when Sam had finally trained it out of him, if only so he doesn’t have to open the cupboard, then get a glass, then fill it, then put the juice away, then wash the glass when he’s done, ad nauseam.Even the cat looks disappointed in him when he offers her butt scratches with his right hand.

Worst of all, he can’t put his hair up.That’s just a hazard.

When he finally gives in, it’s only to Clint, who picks him up in his ’64 GTO, the color of which Bucky has heard described as _eggplant,_ and laughs when Bucky climbs inside wearing a wife beater and sweatpants. 

“What’d you last, like, a day?” he asks, diving into Brooklyn traffic like the maniac he is. “Why didn’t you have Steve take you?”

“Not talking to Steve,” Bucky says, though he’s not really sure why, or how long exactly this has been going on. 

He thinks, actually, that maybe he and Steve haven’t been talking, really talking, since Steve burst into the locked room in Azzano and pulled Bucky out of the fire.

The old Bucky.Not him.

Anyway, the nice thing about Clint is that he just shrugs, and when Clint shrugs, he means it.This is possibly why Bucky didn’t ask Steve for a ride, even though Steve probably would’ve come out from D.C. in a heartbeat if it was Bucky asking.Steve would have chatted, and then Bucky would’ve had to chat back, and he doesn’t feel like chatting. 

With Clint, it’s easier.The dude’s a bro.

The bro swerves into a space in Stark’s parking garage like he’s trying to prove something, and Bucky just rolls his eyes like it’s all par for the course with this guy, because it is.If Clint’s not trying to prove something to someone (Bucky), that’s a good time to check his pulse because he’s probably dead.

When Clint lifts his sleeve to scratch at his forearm and in doing so bares the mark he shares with Natasha, the plates in Bucky’s arm grind like a goddamn MVA and things turn just about as awkward as Bucky thinks he could possibly make them without actually opening his mouth.

“What’s up?” Clint says.

Bucky probes his teeth with his tongue, deciding.There’s been a lot of contemplation in the past couple of years, and if it takes Bucky just a little longer than it does everyone else to come to certain conclusions, no one mentions it.

“You ever wish it was some other color?” he says when he’s thought it through.“Red or… purple?”

Clint glances down at the mark on his arm, brown and rich as coffee beans, and snorts with his own stupid version of laughter. 

“No way,” he says. “Brown’s all about comfort. Reliability. Home, that kind of thing. Purple, eh.And red, well.You know.”

Bucky squints at him.

“Love is for children,” he says, eventually, the words coming to him from somewhere long ago, fitting in his mouth like he knows the shape of them, even if he’s certain he’s never said them in this precise order before.

Clint just smiles, a little crooked, and nods. “Love is for children.”

Bucky hasn’t decided whether to ask his next question when the elevator door before them whisks silently open, revealing a mirrored interior that, to Bucky, seems a bit much even for Tony Stark.

“It’s okay,” Clint says, as though sensing his unease.“The mirrors are just there so Tony can prove to himself that he’s not a vampire every morning before leaving the house.”

_Only one vampire currently present in this building, Birdbrain,_ Stark’s voice says from nowhere and everywhere as they step into the elevator. _Can’t wait to see you up close and personal, Tin Man.It’s going to be a delight._

Clint and Bucky exchange a look, and Bucky wonders if it’s too late to query Reddit, or even Craigslist, and take his chances.The arm has certainly suffered through worse.

 

* * *

 

Tony Stark’s workshop is a lot like Tony Stark: shiny, expensive, and all messed up.Although Bucky’s mostly gotten over his fear of things like white coats and stainless steel work benches, he still hesitates before going inside.

That might be the music, though. If someone ever wanted him to come out of semi-retirement for a hit on Kanye West, Bucky’s pretty sure he’d do it pro-bono.

Clint has to hurl something at Tony’s hunched back for Tony to even acknowledge that they’re there, and when he does it’s just with a distracted flap of his hand that isn’t even pointed in their direction.

“I know you’re here, okay, do you really think I don’t know you’re here? Just let me do this one thing, one second, five minutes, an hour and I’m done.”

“Tony,” Clint says, looking around either for something else to throw or because, like Bucky, he worries for Stark’s sanity in this place without any sign of human life, or food, or water.“We had to make an _appointment_.”

This gets Stark’s attention.He swivels around, grease-stained hands on his grease-stained knees, one eye magnified by some kind of bifocal attachment that’s more comical than it can possibly be functional, and glares at them.More specifically, he glares at Bucky.

“Yes, persons who repeatedly decline my offer for Post-Ass-Kicking Shawarma can’t just waltz in off the street expecting me to fix their very broken but highly intriguing metal arm.You take my shawarma, you take my heart - you don’t take my shawarma, you make an appointment.”

“Uh,” says Clint.

“I don’t like Middle Eastern food,” Bucky says with a shrug.

“Get. Out,” Stark stands up like he’s actually going to make Bucky, as he said, get out.He’s much shorter in real life than he is on TV, Bucky realizes then.Must be why he has all this stuff. “No, on second thought, don’t get out. I’m kidding. Someone will think you’re homeless and try to adopt, and then I’ll have to fill out paperwork.Let me ask you, did you dress yourself? It’s been, like, five years, haven’t they taught you about real people clothing?”

“Tony, stop being an asshole,” Clint says. 

“What? I’m just asking a question.”

“If you saw me in real clothes, Stark, you’d be paying _me_ to fix my arm,” Bucky says. “This is so you feel obligated.”

“Obligated? I never feel obligated,” Stark says, but he’s perked up in the same interested way that Clint has.Maybe because neither of them, not even Clint, who Bucky accompanies to the range once or twice a week, have heard Bucky speak with any kind of inflection to his voice before. 

Most of the time, he doesn’t bother speaking at all, but Stark kind of demands it.Letting him fill up all the silence is an affront to Bucky’s recently reacquired personhood.

“All right, Quicksilver, have a seat, let’s see what we got.”

Bucky watches as Stark shoves whatever he’d been working on almost off the bench, making room, and kicks the stool he’d been using toward him at unnecessary speed.Bucky stops it with a flat look that for some reason makes Stark smile, and Clint rolls his eyes like he wouldn’t have done the same thing.

“How long do you think this’ll take?” Clint says as soon as Bucky’s sat down.

“What?” Stark says, thunking the tiniest toolkit Bucky has ever seen onto the bench. “How should I know? I haven’t even looked at the thing.Go take a nap, or something, it’s not like you don’t live here. Jesus. Play a video game. I don’t know what you do.”

“Are you going be okay, Barnes?” Clint says, turning to Bucky with a look that seems almost lost, as though even he’s not quite sure how to handle Tony even after all these years. 

Bucky shrugs.Stark, as Steve predicted, isn’t even looking at him, already ensconced in scanning the arm with something that looks like a credit card with a holster.Maybe this won’t be so bad.Maybe Stark’s playlist will shuffle from rap to rock, and he’ll work in silence as he fixes the arm, and Bucky will be able to go home and pet his cat like she likes, and clean the place up like _he_ likes, and be alone again, and things will be fine.

“I guess.”

“Okay,” Clint says.He sounds skeptical. “Text me when you’re done, I’ll take you home.”

Bucky shoos him.It’s not like he can’t take care of himself.

 

* * *

 

Contrary to Bucky’s hopes, Tony Stark never actually stops talking.

He talks through the scanning of the arm.He talks through its diagramming.Sometimes, he even talks through _himself_ , interrupting his own running monologue in such a Shakespearian way that Bucky thinks he could’ve been trained classically, but most likely just happens to talk so much that, like a monkey at a keyboard, he happens upon syntax resembling the greats of the canon.

It’s annoying.About an hour in, Bucky says so.

“You ever shut up?” he asks.

Stark continues digging his way into the diagram of Bucky’s arm like he’s doing surgery and not just fingering the air.He hasn’t even touched it yet, and Bucky feels, well.He feels a little weird about the whole thing.When he was with Hydra (when HYDRA _had him_ , he corrects mentally), the techs were always up in his face, their appropriation of his body as assumed as the frequent and casual wiping of his mind.

When something went wrong with the arm, they ripped it open and got to it, heedless of (or ignorant to) the idea that it might be causing their asset pain.

Great, Bucky thinks.Now he’s uncomfortable because he’s not uncomfortable.What a life.

“Do you ever say anything?” Stark replies, not glancing away from his diagram.

“I just did,” Bucky mumbles.

“Oh boy, yeah, what a treat that was. I thought you were mute or, let’s be real, brain-damaged, before you came out with that obligation thing - _nice_ , by the way, that was almost innuendo - but what I meant was, do you ever talk. Talk. You know, talk.”

Bucky feels a muscle in his jaw tick. 

“See, I see you thinking in there, but is there some kind of disconnect between the brain and the mouth, or is it me, is it the setting, is it because of Kanye—”

“It’s you,” Bucky assures him.

Stark smiles.His smile doesn’t reach his eyes, but it does an extremely passable job of being a smile otherwise.Bucky wonders if he should take notes.

“Well, there. Now we’re getting somewhere.” Stark spins the diagram of Bucky’s arm in the air, making it unclear if he’s talking about the repairs or the conversation.“The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, Man of Steel.And I found the problem.”

Bucky lets out a breath. 

“Show me.”

The problem, as Stark describes it, is that Bucky needs a new arm.

“No,” Bucky says, two days later, which is how long it takes for Stark to get him in his workshop again. “I don’t.”

“Yes, you do.”Stark has the same diagram as before floating in the air above his bench, but this time it’s exploded to show Bucky the ruined part that ruined the other part that ruined the other part that broke his arm, and this time when he gestures at it, it’s with so much force that the diagram goes spinning on its z axis. “Look, if you need me to go through it again—”

“I don’t,” Bucky says.He pokes at the diagram, halting its spin and turning the offending part red. “This piece ground up against this piece, which bent this piece, and you don’t have replacements for any of these pieces—”

“—obsolete Soviet technology, yes—”

“—meaning the rest of the arm—”

“— _also_ has to go, which I can _do_ , see, all I have to do is detach—”

“It’s attached,” Bucky states.

“Yes, Barnes, that’s where the detach part comes in,” Stark replies.

“No, Stark.I’m attached to it.”

Stark’s face crumples up in a way that Bucky can already tell means this is going to get a lot more awkward and involved than Bucky had anticipated. 

“I can get you a new one. A better one. One that hasn’t killed people.”

Bucky pinches the bridge of his nose. 

“Leave it to the Winter Soldier to form an emotional bond with his metal arm,” Stark huffs.“It’s cute, a little weird, but I mean, to each his own.” Stark pauses. Goes on before Bucky can stop him, “I thought the soul mark looked a little small, but feasibly, if you— kind of—“ 

Stark brings his hand around to his own neck, pantomiming what must be, in Stark’s language, a joke about Bucky giving himself a soul mark. 

It’s not very funny, as far as jokes go. 

And it would be fine, probably. It’s just that he’d seen Natasha that morning, had allowed her to take him out for coffee and had been stupid enough to let his gaze linger too long on the washed out blue that encircles her wrist like a cuff, and yeah, for a second he’d let himself feel it, that indescribable sensation he sometimes got of once having been slightly more human than he is today.

Worse, there had been nothing he could do about it.There are seven missed calls on his phone from Steve, and there’s nothing Bucky can _do_.

So, he snatches something out of the air - a little round robot thing that’s been buzzing around his head and humming in his ear for the last thirty minutes, probably monitoring his heart rate and his brain waves and how fucking full his bladder is - and slams it into the ground with the kind of satisfaction that only comes from breaking something fragile and expensive. 

Before he knows it, he’s about two inches from Tony Stark’s face, hissing for all he’s worth, “It is fucking. Attached.”

He’s not on Stark long enough to see what his expression’s doing, but Bucky can hear it in his voice when, after Bucky rucks up the back of his own shirt and turns around to _show_ him, Stark says, “Oh. Would you look at that.” 

Bucky hears him take a breath.

“Still possible, though.Angle’s just about right.”

“Fuck you, Stark,” Bucky growls, grabbing the hoodie he can barely put on and stalking toward the door with it. The door opens with a quiet flourish, which is a shame because Bucky had wanted to break that, too.

_Would you like me to call you a cab, sir?_

The voice of Stark’s AI is smooth and British and smug, and it’s all Bucky can do not to pound his fist into the wall.Of course, even the thought of it lands far from satisfying, as his arm’s still strapped to his chest, probably forever.

“I’ll walk,” he growls, and does.

 

* * *

 

The thing about soul marks is, there’s no manual.Sure, some guy buried in some government office is probably working on one right now, compiling potential laws and outlining potential rules detailing the properties they _think_ exist as he sips his cold coffee and shivers under the air conditioning, but that guy’s job is the definition of a dead-end.

It’s a dead-end because the moment someone thinks they know something about a mark, someone else, somewhere else, proves them wrong.

This mark fades only after the giver dies, that one weakens when its bearer falls out of love.A mystery for the ages, never to be solved in the short blink of humanity’s lifetime.

Who knows, maybe someone _could_ give themselves a mark.Bucky sure as hell doesn’t know a thing about it.

But there are things about soul marks that he knows for certain:He has one.He used to have two.

He doesn’t remember when he lost the one he used to have.He doesn’t remember when he got the one he has to keep.And people like him - people who _used_ to be people - they don’t get to start over. 

What he’s lost is gone. What he’s got is there to stay.

 

* * *

 

It’s two days later that Steve shows up on his doorstep, and frankly, Bucky’s a little surprised he managed to hold out this long.Steve never has been a model of patience.

The knock gives it away, and it’s only because he’s feeling charitable that Bucky decides to open the door to tell the guy to fuck off, rather than just buzzing through.When he does, though, it’s to find Steve standing under the blank white light outside the door, a wide-leafed plant under one arm like deja vu, and a damned good distraction to boot.

“It’s a golden pothos,” Steve says with a crooked smile. “I hear it’s hard to kill.”

Bucky rolls his eyes, wondering if he’d looked or sounded this dumb when he’d come out of the cold in just the same way, standing under Steve’s porch light with the same kind of stupid plant tucked into his elbow.

“Get in here, punk,” he says, moving out of the doorway so Steve can enter.

“Oh,” Steve says, when he does.

It’s the kind of ‘oh’ that escapes when someone learns a particularly unsavory fact about someone they previously held in high esteem, or when they’re Steve Rogers and they see a really big mess.

“Yeah, yeah,” Bucky says, snatching the pothos away from Steve and shoving it onto the coffee table next to two bowls that had once contained cereal, but which now contain only faintly peach-colored milk.“You know how hard it is to clean up after yourself with only one arm?”

“It’s okay,” Steve says, causing Bucky to narrow his eyes suspiciously. “I’ll help.” 

They spend the next couple of hours combing their way through Bucky’s apartment, gathering fallen leaves and sweeping up cat hair. Steve doesn’t chatter; instead, he lets Bucky navigate the noisy Brooklyn silence the way he used to when they were boys, with made up stories whose only kernel of truth lay in the feelings they evoked. 

They eat pizza for lunch, and Steve almost cries because it’s so good, which Bucky finds extremely offensive because Steve’s pizza has _anchovies_ on it.

Later, Steve does the dishes while Bucky watches, hip pressed against the counter and good arm hooked over the stuck one in such a way that it’s almost like they’re crossed. 

The mood’s good.Despite Bucky’s glare, Steve’s humming something that sounds suspiciously like Avril Lavigne and soaping up the plates like a champ, like he belongs in Bucky’s kitchen without any shoes on and the sleeves of his henley rolled up and smeared with marinara sauce.

“The hell do you want, Steve?” Bucky says, before the cat can come out and twine between their legs like some kind of goddamn feline prophecy. 

“Hm? Oh. Nothing,” Steve says in a way that clearly means _something_. “You’ve been um, screening? my calls.”

Bucky makes a face.Usually he finds Steve’s dumb blond-dropped-from-the-1940’s act amusing and endearing both, but today it makes him want to sock Steve in the nose. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Usually, people take that to mean that someone doesn’t want to talk to them, not as an invitation to come over.”

“Don’t be that way, Buck.”Steve finishes drying the last plate and sets it neatly on the rack beside the sink, turning to mirror Bucky’s own stance against the counter.“Tony told me what happened.”

“‘Course he did,” Bucky mumbles.Fucking Iron Spy, is what Tony Stark is. No friend to Bucky Barnes.

“Buck,” Steve says, voice so earnest it physically hurts to listen to. “Would you look at me?”

Bucky lifts his eyes reluctantly.

“Are you gonna let me read it now?Are we going to talk?”

Bucky’s heart stammers into an alarming rhythm in his chest, and he doesn’t understand why he has to swallow three times before managing to bring the words up. “You’re really barking up the wrong tree if you don’t want to piss me off, pal.”

Steve looks crestfallen.Bucky forces himself to watch, to take in the fallout and damage of Steve’s expression, of this ruin so like all those others Bucky’s hands have held.He wishes Steve would leave, hates his visits, how he fits into Bucky’s home and life like a missing puzzle piece when Bucky only fits into Steve’s like a hole.

“It’s been almost three years,” Steve says so softly Bucky wouldn’t have heard it if he hadn’t been enhanced.The knob of Steve’s throat works up and down and Bucky feels it as though it’s his own. “I miss—”

“I know,” Bucky says.His heart is a clenched fist in his chest.Then again, everything about him is a clenched fist.“Say ‘hi’ to Sam for me.”

 

* * *

 

After Steve leaves, Bucky decides it’s time to stop wallowing and get his shit together - or, at least the shit he can gather in one arm.He showers and shaves and puts on a pair of jeans that take him about ten minutes to button, but when he’s done he feels more like a human than he has for the last week or so, and that’s a start. 

It’s the cat that gets him out of the apartment, but when he comes back from picking up her food he only makes it a few steps into his complex before realizing something’s off.

He has his knife out instantly (he still doesn’t carry, more out of habit now than _just in case_ ) and is about to break his own door out of its frame when Tony Stark opens it in his face and gets a knife nearly up his nose for his trouble.

“Woah, woah, woah, Rambo, please.It’s me, Tony, we met three days ago when you came into my house and broke my tiny robot in a fit of rage.Don’t worry, I’m not even mad, okay, just— oh.”

They’re both inside before Stark can even get his mouth to stop running, which Bucky thinks has to be some kind of a record that he ought to check out some time, possibly with nuSHIELD, or whatever the hell it is Coulson’s calling it this week.He’s forgotten the cat food in the hall, but Stark can’t run that fast and it only takes Bucky a second to retrieve it.

“What the hell, Stark?” he demands when he does.

Stark, pressed up against a counter for the second time in as many meetings, doesn’t look at all affronted at having been manhandled, and in fact gives Bucky such a guileless look that Bucky has to wonder if he even understands the basic laws of breaking and entering or just doesn’t care.

“I just came by to drop something off.A present. I brought you a present.”

Bucky stares at him.

“Okay,” Stark rolls his eyes so far into his head that it looks physically painful, “It’s not really a present. You have to give it back. But it is a thing.”

“You couldn’t just leave it outside my door?” Bucky takes another step forward, but instead of looking menaced, Stark just looks intrigued. “How did you even get in this building?”

Maybe Stark always looks intrigued - Bucky doesn’t know. That could just be his face.What’s not just his face, though, is the way he leans back against the counter, one knee turning out just so in an invitation that Bucky’s too surprised by to ignore completely.

“I designed the security system for this building. Hell, I _am_ the security system for this building.Did you know you’re wearing jeans? Nice apartment by the way. What’s with all the plants?”

“Stark.”

Bucky moves forward with the same purposeful stroll he’d used first to seduce a woman, and later to eliminate a target.He may no longer have the use of both his arms, but when he plants the one hand on the counter beside Stark’s hip, it has the desired effect.Stark’s body lengthens, then stills. He shuts his mouth.

“Leave my apartment,” Bucky says.

“That is not,” Stark says, “what I thought you were going to say.”

Bucky’s own laugh surprises him.It’s been awhile since he really laughed; he thinks the last time, it was Natasha: a quirk of her lips and a flip of her hair, and Clint there with his wild grin, the two of them together with the ease of understanding that Bucky, an outsider, could only find comical and unknowable.

He lets Stark go, moving back into the green-hued depths of the apartment, where everything is cool and clean-smelling like Bucky likes it. 

There are a lot of plants, he admits silently, his eyes traveling over all the variously shaped leaves, just to make sure Stark didn’t touch anything.He still likes them, and doesn’t think he’ll ever give them up.They were the first living things he’d been able to lay his hands on after leaving HYDRA, the first things he hadn’t destroyed, and he’s grown fond of them since, adding to their number whenever he happens across one that he doesn’t already own.

Stark’s too quiet behind him.Watching him like a nature documentary, it seems.Bucky wants to ask if he’s learned anything.

“What?” he says instead.

“Nothing,” Stark says, recovering himself with the kind of clunky difficulty a man who rarely has to do it. “Just— look at the thing, will you? I left it on the table, next to your ficus, or whatever it is.”

He’s by the door when he speaks again, hands restless in his pockets and, Bucky can tell, nervous in some indefinable way. “Press the red button. It’ll scan your whole body so we can see just how far they, you know, what they did. Then I’ll see if I can fix it.No promises, though.”

“Stark,” Bucky says, before he can close the door. “Don’t break into my apartment. I could’ve killed you.”

“Ah. Well.” Stark’s mouth makes that smile again, the one that doesn’t reach his eyes. “Wouldn’t be the first time.Just do the thing, Terminator.I’ll be in touch.”

 

* * *

 

Natasha appears uninvited with a tiny overnight bag containing only a toothbrush and three gallons of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. 

Bucky hasn’t touched the small orb since Stark left it on his kitchen table two days ago, but at some point the cat had batted it into the living room, and Natasha picks it up after throwing her bag into the bathroom and her pants on the bedroom floor.

“Kind of an expensive looking cat toy,” she says, tossing it up and down a few times before flopping onto Bucky’s couch with her feet on the coffee table.

Bucky shrugs.He’s never entirely sure what to do at first when Natasha comes around like this, but when she cranes her head over the back of the couch to look at him, he pads over and sits cross-legged beside her.

“Both Stark and Steve are annoying me.That means you’re annoying me, James.”

She calls him James.She has his mark.She doesn’t wear pants.Everything is fine.

“In Stark’s case, I think he was probably born that way.Not my fault.”

“And what about Steve?”

“Steve’s Steve.” Bucky shrugs again.Steve had called him that morning, bright as sunshine, and asked if Bucky had wanted to go bowling with him.Really, pal?Bowling?“Don’t know what you expect me to do about _that_ , either.”

Natasha side-eyes him. “Maybe you should stop being such a dick to him.Just a suggestion.”

Bucky thinks about it.He plucks Stark’s machine from Natasha’s fingers - she lets him - and looks at it for the very first time.

The problem is, and he tells himself this all the time, he doesn’t know how to be around Steve anymore. The video clips playing on repeat at the Smithsonian exhibit had shown Steve looking at his Bucky Barnes like that Bucky lit up the sky, but all Bucky can remember is looking at Steve like that, back when Steve was small and some version of his.Now Steve’s big and someone else’s, and as much as Bucky has been changed, Steve has, too.They just don’t fit anymore.

“And Stark?” Bucky asks, which Natasha must expect because she rolls her eyes, ready for it.

“You could start by letting him have his scan.Probably wouldn’t hurt if you let him read your file, either.”

“ _No_ ,” Bucky hisses.Steve’s been asking for the thing for years and is too noble to take it for himself. Stark’s character isn’t so upstanding, and if he wants it, he’ll have to get it by some means other than Bucky handing it over willingly. “Is that why you’re here? To convince me?”

“No, James,” Natasha says. “I just thought you might need a friend with you when you decided to do it.”

Of course he decides to do it, and it doesn’t have a thing to do with Natasha. 

A gallon of ice cream in and two Clint Eastwood movies down, Bucky pushes the little button and allows the tiny robot - identical to the one he smashed, which makes him appreciate Stark’s sense of humor despite himself - to move its blue light over his frame for what can’t be more than thirty seconds. 

He gets a text from Stark two minutes later.

_(212): Knew you'd cave_

_(212): Mother of mercy the things I could do to you_

“I think Tony Stark’s coming on to me,” he says a little later, during _Gran Torino._ They both like Eastwood’s newer stuff best.Something about crochety old men and the interminable passage of time.

Natasha looks up from petting the cat, whose paws work gently over the brown mark on her thigh.The cat’s acting pretty friendly.She tolerates Bucky, most days.

“I’d be worried if he wasn’t,” Natasha says. “Watch the movie.”

 

* * *

 

Bucky texts Steve. 

_Stark thinks he can fix my arm._

Steve doesn’t text him back.

 

* * *

 

Despite agreeing to the scan, Bucky screens the twelve calls from Stark that filter in over the next few days.The text messages are less sporadic - considering that he’s at a weeklong tech conference, Bucky assumes his hands are freer to roam than his mouth — but easily ignored, especially since now that it’s passed the 24 hour mark with no response from Steve, the last thing Bucky wants to do is click on the little red bubble with its steadily growing number. 

He hates technology.Just gives him a hundred more ways to worry than what he needs.He’s been worrying the same way since the 40’s, and it’s served him well in regard to Steve Rogers all his miserable life.He doesn’t need more.

He’s halfway through another bottle of worry and is thinking of switching to the hard stuff when Nick Fury walks into the bar on 4th Ave wearing his stupid trench coat and a look that would curdle milk.Bucky groans and wonders when this became his life.

“Doesn’t anyone ever stay dead in this world?” he mutters. 

Fury just chuckles from the stool beside him and orders a scotch, the Lazarithian bastard.

“You know, you wouldn’t have to wonder where your boy is if you’d suit up and join the team.Guess you’d have to let Stark get his hands on you for that, though.Can’t be a sharpshooter with one arm.”

Bucky swallows the rest of his beer in one go, sliding off the stool and flipping a twenty dollar bill onto the bar. 

“He’s not my boy,” he says, leaving before Fury can say whatever it is Fury says to get people to join his stupid team.

Even _he’d_ had a telltale hint of yellow slotted between his fingers, signs of a life lived in the spaces between bullets.Bucky still isn’t sure how he’d missed the kill shot on that one.

 

* * *

 

Stark knocks this time.Also to his credit is the fact that his face is hidden by a giant plant.

“Stop bringing me presents I don’t want,” Bucky says, not letting him in. 

This is getting a bit ridiculous. Sure, he’s being stubborn about the arm thing, but that doesn’t mean that Tony Stark in his pressed charcoal suits with his devil’s goatee belong anywhere near his apartment.No one belongs anywhere near his apartment.He’s not sure why people keep showing up.

“Oh, come on. Let me make the joke first,” Stark says.

“Lilies are poisonous to cats.”

Stark pokes his head out from behind the spread of leaves, looks past Bucky into his apartment, and says, completely straight faced, “I see no evidence of a cat in residence.”

Bucky points to where the cat’s sitting in a late-autumn sunbeam not ten feet into the apartment, wondering if ‘terrible excuse for a rhyme’ is a decent enough defense for battery charges. Stark’s expression goes complicated.

“Okay, look,” he says, shifting the plant so Bucky has to look at his face.It’s an unfortunate decision.Stark’s actually a lot easier to tolerate when Bucky’s pretending he’s a talking peace lily. “How do I get you to come back to Avenger’s Tower with me?”

For maybe the first time since he came in, Bucky doesn’t have to think about this decision.If it’s between sitting at home worrying about Steve - who Bucky realizes could either be dead or just having a really nice time with that live-in of his, neither of which Bucky wants to think about - or being tortured by Tony Stark, he’d rather the latter.

“This’ll work.”

Bucky grabs his jacket and keys and, before Stark can stick his nose another inch inside, shoves past him out into the hallway.The lily’s in a nice, heavy pot, and appears to be in pretty good shape, which makes it all the more of a shame when Bucky dumps it in the garbage bin on the way out.

“You sure know how to make a guy feel special, Eddard. I thought you were supposed to be some kind of playboy in your heyday.”

Bucky side-eyes him for what has to be the fiftieth time in their acquaintanceship. 

“Rake. Charmer. Stud,” Stark elaborates, and then, when Bucky’s expression doesn’t change, “Oh god, you’re kidding.Eddard Stark? Winter is coming?You’ve never seen Game of Thrones?” 

“Do I look like someone who’s seen something called Game of Thrones? What is it, a documentary on your family?” 

Stark laughs, throwing back his head.After that, it’s surprisingly easy to slide into the car opposite him, but Bucky leaves the door open for a moment, reveling in the city air that feels like Brooklyn - the not the good old Brooklyn with its flush of movement and steady rhythm that he was once used to, but a Brooklyn that might’ve once _been_ that Brooklyn.A Brooklyn that, for the first time, Bucky thinks he might believe actually exists with him in it.

Stark’s eyes are on him, his gaze calculating.

“You need a hotdog,” he announces. “We need hotdogs. Happy, hotdogs!”

 

* * *

 

They get hotdogs from a street vendor and stand eating them on the stoop of an antiques boutique until Stark spots a falafel stand and coerces Bucky over.The strong taste of garlic and the strange texture conspire to wrinkle Bucky’s nose, but in the end they’re the exact attributes that have him swallowing the rest in three big bites and ordering a second for the road.

Stark keeps up a steady stream of talk from Brooklyn to Manhattan, blathering on about everything from the history of falafel to all sorts of other things he thinks Bucky’s probably been missing out on. 

“You should have a list. Cap has a list, I’m sure you’ve seen it by now. Long list - everything from build-a-bear to NASCAR.”

Bucky has not, in fact, seen Steve’s list.He hasn’t seen or heard from Steve in over a week.Yet he’s determined that he will not ask Stark.He will not ask Sam.He will not ask Natasha.He will not hunt down Nick Fury and torture the information out of him.

Steve existed for over three years before Bucky came back on the scene - and a year before that, to boot.In that time, he’d gained 130 lbs in muscle, a dame, hero status, a new team, a fella, and, apparently, a list of fifty thousand things he needed to do in the new century.He doesn’t need Bucky Barnes.

“What’s the matter, ace? You just deflated like a balloon.”

Bucky looks up, realizes that he’s been sitting in Stark’s workshop long enough for Stark to open his arm up, and deepens his frown.Did Bucky show him that, or did he gather it from the dual set of scans floating on either side of the workbench? 

“I’m fine,” Bucky says.He jerks his chin toward where Stark is working. “The hell are you doing in there, Stark?”

“Just working a miracle, Metallica.Speaking of, JARVIS?”

The sound of heavy metal fills the room, loud enough that Bucky ducks. 

Stark sniggers, saying, “Thought this’d be right up your alley.”

It’s actually not bad.Bucky doesn’t hate it, anyway, and he lets Stark tinker around for a little longer, the sensation almost pleasant compared to all the other times anyone, himself included, had worked on the arm.He might actually zone out a little listening to the music and Stark’s uncharacteristic silence, and if it’s comfortable, well, sure it is.

About an hour later, Stark wheels back his stool, smacking his hands together with a pop and a whistle. “I’ve still got it,” he says.“Flex for me.”

Bucky does.The arm moves.

“Holy shit,” he says. “I thought you said you couldn’t fix it.”

“Did I? Did I say that? Doesn’t seem like me. Anyway, the thing’s still FUBAR, but it’ll work until you let me build you up a new one—I know, don’t say it, I’m still working on how to get around the part where they bolted the thing into your spine and etc., but I _will_ figure that out.Here’s the catch. Ready, Cinderella?”Bucky’s too busy wiggling his fingers to nod. “No strenuous activities. That means _no_ missions. I know how you love subbing in.”

“Yeah,” Bucky sneers, thinking of Fury, “not a problem. Can I—“

“Yeah, you can jerk off with it, no big.”

“Funny.”

“Just don’t use it as a murder arm for awhile and it won’t turn back into a pumpkin.” Stark’s eyes are sparkling, and even though Bucky’s pretty still, he can see his own minute movements tracked by Stark’s gaze.

“Gonna need you back in here every week for a tune up, though, or it won’t last.Think you can handle me?”

It’s Bucky’s turn to pin Stark with his own stare.

“Sure thing, pal,” he says.“But you might want to start asking yourself that.”

 

* * *

 

When he gets home late that night, arms (arms!) loaded with groceries, he knocks over a tiny pot of blue and pink forget-me-nots sitting outside his door.The pot itself is one of those plastic green ones, fitting neatly into Bucky’s palm.

He plucks the tiny square of paper from between the flowers and spends some time unfolding it at the kitchen table.It’s a full-sized sheet of paper folded into an one by one inch square, which is about the stupidest thing Bucky can ever think of anyone doing, and it has _Steve_ written all over it.

Instead of containing any kind of explanation for Steve’s absence, or the flowers, or any damn thing in this world, the paper bares only a sketch in pencil. 

Bucky’s hands - he knows they’re his, because who else has one that’s made entirely of metal? - cupping a handful of soil from which grows half a dozen of tiny flowers, the exact same that had been left on his door.

It’s good.Steve was always good, but it’s _really_ good, and Bucky’s heart aches like someone who’s missed the raising of a great monument, the birth of a planet, the return of a dead loved one.

“This asshole,” he mutters.

Now he’s going to have to find a spare pot.

 

* * *

 

“I got your… plant,” Bucky says when he calls Steve the next afternoon, after busying himself at everything he can find just to prolong it.It itches like a rash.“Thanks.”

“I know you don’t have a lot of flowers, but the girl, the woman at the florist’s, she said they were good for… apologies.”

Bucky sighs.

“What are you apologizing for, Steve.”

“Just for worrying you, I guess.Sorry I didn’t text you back.Clint and I, we were on radio silence.But I’m sorry I didn’t, anyway.”

Leave it to Steve Rogers.Never one for excuses, even when there is an excuse.That explains Natasha, though.Bucky never thought she had it in her to be worried about someone, let alone a dope like Clint Barton. It hurts him a little, this thought - twinges somewhere in a vestigial organ he’s not sure even evolution remembers the purpose of.

“I know you can take care of yourself, Stevie,” Bucky says.

There’s a pause.Bucky bites his lip.

“Natasha said you were a little weird, is all.I told her, maybe she could check on you, she said you two hung out.”

Bucky scoffs. “What’s weird?”

“Well.” And now Bucky can hear Steve’s smile, no doubt that little one he has that perks up just the corners when he’s trying not to let it because he knows it’ll just piss Bucky off if it does. “She said you cried at some Clint Eastwood movie?”

What the.

“You know she was trained from birth as a kind of professional liar.Never trust a Russian to tell you the truth, Steve.”

“That include you?”

“I’m not really Russian, see.There’s a little more nuance to it than that.”

“Oh, is that how it is?”Steve chuckles a low, pleased rumble that the phone can’t quite capture the real richness of.“Regardless, I’m fine.And it’s great about the arm.I hear Stark was able to get it in working order for you.”

“It’ll do in a pinch,” Bucky says, his smile flagging a little.Already the call has gone on too long.He needs to end it. “Stark says no vigorous activity, so I guess I’m off active duty for awhile.”

“You’re already—oh, Jesus, Buck, really?” Steve groans.

Bucky laughs, unable to help himself.

“Nah, don’t worry about me.Waxing the dolphin’s okay, just gonna have to take it easy.”

“I’m hanging up,” Steve says.

“Okay,” says Bucky.

“Can we grab dinner sometime? I’ll even come out to Brooklyn.”

“Sure, pal.Whatever you want.”

“I do,” Steve says, and damn him his earnestness. “I really do.”

Bucky grips the phone, clutching onto the silence until it slips out of his fingers.“Thanks for the flowers.”

“Sure, Buck. Of course.”

“Say ‘hi’ to Sam for me.”

 

* * *

 

Everything’s fine, which is why he shows up at Stark’s mansion, or whatever the hell he’s calling it, two days ahead of schedule clean shaven and wearing his tightest pair of jeans.

Stark takes one look at him and grabs his jacket.They’re not getting any work done today, that’s for sure.

They work on checking off the first few items on Bucky’s hastily complied list before it devolves into bar hopping, and boy, can Tony Stark hold his drink.Bucky’s knock-off serum might be slightly inferior to Steve’s version, but it depends on your perspective, and the fact that he can get a good buzz going without having to drink the entire bar has always been a plus in his book. 

Somehow, it gets on to midnight before they even realize the sun has gone down, and Stark says something about how he has a thing - a thing, you know, a thing - tomorrow early, and doesn’t Bucky have a parole officer to check in with? So they go, Stark trying to work his phone well enough to call the car, while also narrowly avoiding every street lamp on Broadway.

“Shit, this was a good idea,” Stark says. “My ideas are the absolute best.”

“This was my idea,” Bucky replies, digging around his - Stark’s? - jacket for a cigarette.He doesn’t find one, either because it’s Stark’s jacket or because he stopped smoking sometime in the 60’s.

Stark slumps with his shoulder against the brick wall Bucky’s leaning against and nods. He’s close enough for Bucky to smell the whiskey on him, warm and a little sweet. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. Those pants - those were your idea.”

Bucky laughs, delighted. “Yeah? You accusing me of something, Stark?”

“Yeah,” Stark says, and Bucky knows - of course he knows - what’s about to happen before it does, but sure, he lets Stark kiss him. 

Stark’s mouth is hot and wet and laced with alcohol.It’s good.Everything a kiss should be, and something more, something Bucky can’t identify.

At least, he can’t identify it until Stark pulls back, his mouth swollen and his expression already halfway to down the road to thoroughly fucked, and says, “Oh.”

Because he’s pulled his hand back from Bucky’s neck and has left something behind.Bucky _feels_ it without having to see it, and after a taut second of deliberation, he removes his own hand from Stark’s bare arm to get himself a look.

Red as blood and dark as sin, there it is.Bucky Barnes’s handprint on Tony Stark’s arm.

“Dammit,” Bucky says.

 

* * *

 

They don’t talk about it.Stark talks about it - at insufferable length, all the way back to Bucky’s place - but _they_ don’t. What’s there to say?  
  
When Stark tries to come up, Bucky’s metal arm across the door is all it takes to send him sulking back to his waiting vehicle. No talk required to get that particular point across.

“Make sure you keep our appointment,” Stark says across the sidewalk that’s somehow still moderately crowded, even after midnight. He’s got his hands in his pockets and this smirk on his face that Bucky knows means he’s gonna drive it like he stole it.

Very much without his consent, Bucky’s dick stirs in his pants.

“I’ll think about it,” he replies.

“Yeah,” Stark says, biting his lip and letting his eyes trail down Bucky’s body. “You think about it.”

 

* * *

 

The thing about soul marks is, you don’t really get to think about it.He doesn’t quite remember Natasha’s, but he remembers Steve’s.From the second that mark burned its way into him, a cuff about his bicep that grew along with Steve’s hands and sunk straight into Bucky’s bones, Bucky was never able to do anything else. There was no decision left to him. He was with Steve until the end of the line.From his bedside to his six.With fists or with bullets.That’s what the mark means.

That’s what it meant.

So, when he told Stark he’d think about it, he doesn’t.Not really.He just shows up.

He shows up and he fucks Stark up against his workbench, jeans barely undone, one hand over Stark’s mouth to stop him talking. It’s a wild thing.

It’s a wild thing, and maybe it’s just what Bucky needs.He makes Stark come twice and they trade kisses after, ruthlessly learning each other’s mouths and each other’s marks, and after Stark has had a look at his arm, done his maintenance, they fuck again.

In Stark’s bed later, Bucky discovers that marks Stark has up and down his body.He looks like a fucking finger painting.

“Get around much?” Bucky asks, no judgement. 

He’s tracing a sunset stripe of orange-red down Stark’s forearm with a fingertip that could have only come from a movement of just the same. Stark has a perfect impression of lips in purple just on his ribs, and Bucky has to wonder how it came about that the first time someone touched him it was like that.He thinks he remembers Dum Dum having some wild array of marks, too, but that’s a murky memory and he doesn’t trust it - or Dugan - to tell him the truth.

“Just lucky, that’s all,” Stark says.He drinks his scotch lazily, and if he appears inattentive, Bucky knows it’s put on. Every ounce of his attention, heavy and almost palpable, is on Bucky and Bucky’s hands. “Maybe my soul’s ready to ascend.” 

Bucky snorts.“What?”

“Ascension, Barnes. Highest plane of existence? Human destiny? Any of this ringing a bell?”

Bucky lifts his head from where it’s been pillowed on his arm and gives Stark the kind of look he deserves for this nonsense.He’d expect this shit from Steve, even Clint, but Stark?

Stark’s expression is genuinely baffled. “You never took Soul Mate Theory in school? Jesus. What were they teaching kids in the 1700s?”

“Kids take Soul Mate Theory?” 

Bucky can hear the derision in his own voice, but he sure as hell isn’t softening it for Stark. It shouldn’t bother him, really.Just another way the world has changed, and not for the better. 

He has to wonder, though.Why the fuck would you need a _class_? What the hell’s there to learn that Tony Stark would bother remembering when it isn't made of gears or artificial numbers?

“Yes, Barnes,” Stark says from where he’s bent to mouth the space between Bucky’s navel and his pubic bone. “We’re not savages.”  
  
Bucky snorts as Stark throws the last of his scotch back. It’s maybe 10 o’clock in the morning.

“You want to go again?” Stark asks, sticking his tongue into Bucky’s navel. “I’ve got a meeting in an hour.”

 

* * *

 

He does this thing with Stark.Bucky doesn’t know what it means.

Stark checks on the arm, they fuck.They don’t talk about it, but it’s not weird like Bucky thought it would be.Stark still comes to his apartment sometimes bearing outrageous gifts that are totally inappropriate for Bucky’s life, and Bucky continues not to let him in.He doesn’t spend the night at Avengers Castle.He doesn’t let Stark fuck him.He doesn’t ask Stark any more about soul marks.

It’s getting on toward fall, and all of a sudden Bucky realizes the leaves have all slightly shifted in color, just the barest tempering of verdant green into orangeish red, everything getting a little bit murky and blurred.He hasn’t seen Steve for a couple of weeks, and just when Bucky’s starting to get nervous he’s going to show up on the welcome mat again, Stark announces he’s throwing a party.

“What kind of party?” Bucky asks, a little suspicious. 

So far, Stark has been incredibly cool, not at all clingy or needy or pushy, and sure, he runs his mouth at a constant rate of 180 mph, but Bucky’s figured out if you put a dick in it, it’s almost guaranteed to shut him the fuck up. 

Still, the other shoe’s got to drop, as they say, and it’s the first thing Stark’s invited him to that’s got other actual human beings involved.

“A party, party.You know, with booze. Dancing, maybe. Truth or Dare.Kid’s stuff.You can meet my friends.”

Bucky breathes out, saying wryly, “I already know all your friends.”

“ _Do_ you now? How about that, don’t even have to break you in.Although, speaking of—“

“When’s this party, and what do I have to wear?”

“Nothing, if you’re feeling generous.” He laughs at Bucky’s look. “It’s not a _gala_ , just wear your duds and do that thing with your hair and it’s whatever. You coming? Say you’re coming.”

Bucky shrugs.It’s not like he has anything else to do.

 

* * *

 

He realizes only after the door opens into the common area of Avengers Tower and Clint says _Oh, shit!_ that he has’t actually seen any of these people in a couple of weeks, not since Stark’s mark, anyway, and maybe he should’ve prepared a statement, or something.

“James,” Natasha says as she slides from the couch like a panther, which even Bucky can admit is slightly frightening, to kiss him on the cheek. “It’s lovely to see you.New jacket?”

“Ha,” Bucky manages.

“That’s a soul mark, Tash,” Clint calls from where he’s leaning over the back of the couch, his eyes crinkled into tiny slits from the shit eating grin Bucky’s not sure the guy actually deserves.

“I know what it is, Barton,” Natasha says.She links her arm with Bucky’s and drags him into the room, which is a kind of theater-cum-bar, or vice-versa. “It’s only that in the five conversations we’ve had since the last time I saw you, you never said.”

“Nothing to say about it,” Bucky says.

“Yeah, but Stark didn’t mention it either, which is basically unheard of considering _Stark_ ,” Clint says, scooting up to Bucky where Natasha dumps him on the couch after letting him shake hands with an amused Colonel Rhodes, the only other person in the room. 

They’re both on him like a couple of teenage girls at a house party, and it’s been awhile, but Bucky can feel his blood pressure steadily rising.

“Neither did Steve,” Natasha says, cooly.He sees his expression register on her face before he even feels it on his own, and Bucky’s surprised, he’s really surprised, when his heart clenches in what he realizes is panic.

It doesn’t last long.It can’t, because just then the door opens, and Steve actually appears, Stark in tow with a huge bowl of popcorn and his mouth going, sleeves rolled up like a prick even though the weather has finally made a turn for blessedly cool. 

And Bucky sees it, when Steve’s eyes fall on him, when Steve gets it.Because Bucky couldn’t hide Stark’s mark if he wanted to even if Stark could have easily hidden _his_ , could in fact exist without actually making an effort to show it off, and it’s just— _there_.It’s right there.

“Hey, Buck,” Steve says, his expression going complicated and soft in a way that Bucky doesn’t recognize at all.“You made it.”

Bucky doesn’t say anything, just nods.His mouth is dry.Something stirs restlessly beneath his skin, and he needs to fix this, can’t fix this because there’s nothing to _fix_.

The moment passes, and it’s too late.Stark starts talking again, and soon Bruce is there, and then seven pizzas arrive bearing a quantity of cheese that might be distracting if Bucky wasn’t busy inside his own head staring blankly at the white wall that is sometimes his consciousness. 

“James,” he hears Natasha say at one point. “No one’s upset.”

He doesn’t think he replies, but it doesn’t matter.He just keeps thinking it. 

No one’s upset.No one’s upset.

Somehow, he hoofs it through the remainder of the night.Some programming kicks in maybe, and yeah, he’ll have to pay for that later.But it’s better than paying for this, now.

He’ the first one to leave, though, when things show signs of slowing down. Stark follows him out, but for once he doesn’t say anything, just chuffs Bucky on the chin and runs the arm through its range of motion like that’s the reason he came out in the first place.

It’s not until much later, when Bucky’s laying in his bed with the cat compressing his chest and moonlight striking into the room through the jagged shadows of so many leaves, that he even realizes Sam wasn’t there.

 

* * *

 

Things go a little pear-shaped for awhile after that.

Bucky doesn’t really mean for them to.He tries to pull his shit back together and go out with Natasha like he used to and text war with Clint and go to his regular gym at the regular times and just be _normal_ , or at least the kind of normal he’d made for himself after it became pretty clear that real normal was never going to be possible again, but somehow he’s… failing.

“This is actually the opposite of fine, now,” Natasha says, shoving some kind of drink into Bucky’s hand that he didn’t order. 

What he ordered was a coffee.A black, black coffee. A coffee as dark as his outlook. What he gets is a sugary vanilla bean something that he’s pretty sure doesn’t actually have any coffee in it at all.

“You don’t need coffee, James.What you need is a reality check. Sit down.”

Bucky sits. 

“Drink your frappe.”

Bucky drinks.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Natasha said. “This is ridiculous.When was the last time you did something that was’t boning Tony Stark?”

“Could you not say it out loud like that?” Bucky mutters.

“No.” Natasha looks at him like he’s just asked her to set off a nuclear bomb in the middle of a pediatric ward. “I can’t not— listen.You’ve been sinking for awhile now.”

“It’s the arm,” Bucky says. “When it got stuck, it just.It threw me off.I’m still working on getting back up.”

“It’s not the arm,” Natasha says. “This has been going on longer than that.Maybe the arm’s part of it, but don’t pretend this is about a piece of hardware you’ve had for going on seventy years.”

Bucky sits back in his seat.Picks at a divot in the table.Outside the window, people dressed in scarves parse through sunlight the color of begonias with their heads down, determined to get to their destination as though there won’t be another destination to get to after that.

The issue is, Bucky thinks, it that it really is about the arm.

“I haven’t seen Stark since movie night,” Bucky offers, which is true.He’s due to go over there this afternoon for a tune up on the arm, but he hasn’t felt like it since that night, and Stark hasn’t asked.

Across the table, Natasha puts her cup down and, in a move so unlike her Bucky almost jumps, places her coffee-warm hand over Bucky’s real one.“James.That’s really not my point.”

Neither of them says anything after that for a long time, but Natasha doesn’t move her hand.She leaves it there as she stares out the window, and Bucky looks at the color of her skin against his, how they’re in the same tonal family without being the same color.The mark about her wrist looks like a stain.

“Do you remember—” he starts, when he thinks he can speak. But he can’t quite get there.

“Yes?” she says.

“This.” He touches the mark with his thumb. “I can’t remember.I can’t really remember giving it to you.”

Natasha smiles so softly that Bucky feels the absurd urge to cry.

“Does that matter?” she says. “It’s mine.Not everything is about you, James.”

Bucky just stares at her.He doesn’t see how that could be possible.

Natasha seems to have used up her store of leniency and patience for the day because she doesn’t offer anything further, just tells him to get his shit together.

“And call Steve, would you? I can’t take any more of his crap,” she mutters before kissing Bucky on the forehead. 

She snags the remainder of his frappuccino on the way out, and when she stops outside the window to fish her phone out of the tiny purse she’d purchased just a couple hours earlier, her face lights up like a Christmas tree.

She answers it while waving goodbye to Bucky through the window.

“I’m the opposite of fine,” he whispers, only to himself.

 

* * *

 

“Hey, Iron Maiden,” Stark says two days later when he finds Bucky burrowed into the overstuffed couch in the common area of Stark Chateau, where he’s been moping for the better part of an hour as he waits for Stark to finish… something so they can grab dinner.

He eats dinner with Stark now.It’s a thing.

“ _Don’t_ call me that,” he bites out. 

He’s been in a bad mood since shopping with Natasha, but most of it’s because he can’t decide whether to text Steve or not.Calling is out of the question.But either way, what would he even say? 

“You are being a buzzkill right now. I don’t even want to take you into public. I don’t even want to take you out of this room. Let’s order in,” Stark says.“Uh, JARVIS? Can we get something for my babushka here to cry into, like bread, or pasta, or something?”

“ _Right away, Sir.Mr. Barnes, do you have a preference?”_

“Yeah,” Bucky says when he rolls off the couch and into a perfectly executed stalk toward the exit. “Go fuck yourself.”

It almost makes him feel better.Body checking Stark into the doorframe definitely does.

Later, after Bucky’s fucked Stark into the mattress - because of course Tony Stark would find being shoved into a doorknob sexy - they sit naked on Stark’s bed eating Chinese food with wooden chopsticks out of the little white boxes it came in.

Stark insists Bucky’s earlier outburst was due to a phenomenon colloquially known as being ‘hangry,’ but even after an entire box of lo mein, Bucky’s still pretty pissed, so he thinks Stark probably has no idea what the fuck he’s talking about, as usual.

“You gonna finally tell me where that came from?” Stark asks, gesturing to Bucky’s trapezius with his chopsticks.

Bucky glances to where Stark’s pointing despite already knowing what he’s talking about, and rolls the shoulder.This does not make Stark look away.

“Russia,” he says.

“Oh, from Russia with love?” A beat passes.Stark rolls his eyes. “Bond.James Bond.”

Bucky shrugs. “Nope.”

“Oh Christ, well.What can you even do at this point, I wonder— anyway. Huh. From the motherland.You don’t say.I’d have thought… History’s mysteries, I suppose.” Stark pops a piece of shrimp into his mouth.

“Anyone ever tell you you have commitment problems?” Bucky deadpans.

Stark barks out a laugh. “Only every day of my life, sweetheart, is this your first time noticing?” He waves a hand while Bucky shakes his head. “No, of course not. No, I just thought it might be Rogers’s. Little small, I guess.”

“What difference does it make?” Bucky snaps.

“Only that I think I just lost a bet to myself, Stranger Danger.You sure are touchy.This about the arm?”

Bucky almost stabs his chopsticks through the bottom of his carton of orange chicken. “What.”

“Did I stutter?” Stark says, and for a second they stare at each other across the bed, Stark’s eyes totally dark, his expression completely still. 

When he speaks again, it’s maybe the most serious Bucky has ever seen him, and it troubles him that he’s not sure when it started, that he could have missed the transformation between the two Starks, neither of which he really knows. “I figure there’s no way Rogers didn’t leave some kind of mark on you, the way you look at him.And looking at you now, not seeing it? I’m guessing it’s lying frozen in the Alps somewhere.”

Bucky doesn’t wince, but there’s a kind of sting to it anyway.Trouble is, he’s not sure whether it’s him that feels it or Stark.

“And?” he says at last, challenge clear in his voice. “What difference does it make?”

“What difference _doesn’t_ it make, Barnes?”

“If you’re worried about—”

Stark laughs, a forced sound that feels a lot like a punch. “Don’t. Don’t make me. I’ll vomit if I laugh too much.This isn’t—what. What do you think this is? We’re not _married_.We’re not even dating.Is that what you thought this was?”

Bucky shakes his head, dumbfounded. “I—no.”

Because he hadn’t.Hadn’t _thought_ , specifically.And it doesn’t matter, shouldn’t matter; it should, in fact, be a relief.But it’s not. 

It’s not, because Bucky thought he knew a thing (brown is for comfort, and love is for children), and now he’s not really sure he knows anything at all.

“Jesus,” Stark says, picking out all the shrimp one by one and shaking his head. Continuing to chuckle in that way he has, that way of laughing that’s like the smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, this laugh that has no humor to it. “Jesus, Jesus.”

 

* * *

 

Things go to hell in a hand basket from there.They would’ve gone, even if Fury hadn’t showed up in Bucky’s living room with Clint in tow at 2 o’clock one morning, his eye patch gleaming and his trench coat ready to billow.

Would’ve, but hadn’t quite yet.

Whoever jimmied open the door did a fairly decent job, Bucky allows, but they would’ve made it into Bucky’s bedroom if they were better than fairly decent.As it is, Clint trips over the cat almost immediately inside the door, and then he starts cursing, and, well, Bucky’s already awake, anyway. 

(It’s not often that he has nightmares anymore, but sometimes the dreams still wake him - dreams of his boyhood, dreams of Steve with a split lip or a black eye, dreams of Steve with his hands in Bucky’s shirt, dreams of Steve, dreams of Steve.)

“You do realize this isn’t public property, right?” Bucky says, flipping on the kitchen light. 

To his credit, he hadn’t even pulled his gun, though he does fling his knife into the wall next to Clint’s head with a _thwack_ just to show the idiot how close he came to being skewered.Clint has the sense to look ashamed as he tries to coax the cat out from beneath the couch, but most of Bucky’s attention is already on Fury.He’ll make Clint patch the wall later.

There’s been an incident, Fury says, which really just means that someone fucked up along the line because somehow, someone always fucks up. _It always ends in a fight_ , he’d told Steve once, but what he probably should’ve added was that it always starts with a fuck up.

_Steve_ , Bucky thinks, feeling carefully around that sensation that had awoken him, that not-quite-dream that had lingered through a piss and a glass of milk.His tongue probes his lip where a phantom pain promises a split, but no matter how many times he does it, there’s still nothing to be found.

Fury and Clint brief him on the way as Bucky changes into his gear. It’s been over five months since he’d last worn it, but putting it on feels like coming home in a way he doesn’t expect.By the time a chopper drops them at their rendezvous point a few miles out from the facility Iron Man and Captain America are being held, he’s so calm he almost doesn’t feel the need to breathe.

“You know sixes?” he says to Clint as they march through the fall foliage silently, their night vision goggles showing the way. 

As they go, Bucky checks his Mosin-Nagant.It’s vintage, pristine. It has the initials of someone he once was carved into the stock.

“Sure do,” Clint says. “You like it?”

“This was you?” he asks, surprised.

But Clint shakes his head. “Fury. He’s courting you.”

“Jesus.Get that grin off your face, that’s disgusting. This is me.”

They part ways after that.Bucky worked in a sniper pair a few times during the war, back before the Red Room had him training spies and soldiers so constantly that missions were few and far between. After that, of course, he worked alone. No one could keep up with him.

But Hawkeye, he’s something else. Chipper on the other end of the comm, observant, alert.He lets Bucky know when he’s in position and together they take down every mark on the outside of the facility. 

By the end of it, Bucky’s happy to let Hawkeye cover his six as he slips inside.It’s not hard to locate the room Captain America and Iron Man are being kept in, but he cleans up a little first as Hawkeye jokes to him about housecleaning.

When he puts down the last one, he feels… better.Not as though he’s slaked some bloodlust, but more like he’s slipped back into his own skin after months of walking around in someone else’s. _I don’t do that anymore_ is still true, but this isn’t _that._ This is something else.

They’ve got Stark and Steve in some kind of holding tank of questionable make that’s revealed to be highly impressive when Bucky throws an op into it and the guy just happens to disintegrate.Stark would probably be wetting himself over the whole thing, but he looks pretty well concussed from where Bucky’s standing by the door.

He sees Bucky anyway and says, “Hey, Iron Maiden,”but Bucky’s moved on to looking at Steve, and there’s never any going back from that.

Steve looks… Steve looks like Steve.Angry, righteous.Full of vitriol.The guy’s been made of piss and vinegar since Bucky met him; he probably came out of the womb that way.Even when Steve Rogers was 5’4” and 95 lbs, he was still a god -it just so happens his body matches now.Bucky still hasn’t gotten used to it.

Steve doesn’t perk up when Bucky approaches, just keeps that mean expression on his face like he resents Bucky saving his ass for what has to be the five hundredth time in their lives.

And he can’t help it, but something about that stubborn ass look gets Bucky like a cheap shot to the kidney.Even when he was five years old, Steve Rogers thought he didn’t need Bucky Barnes pulling him out of a fight and dragging him home.And god or not, he was just as wrong then as he is now.

“Stark, how do I disable this thing?” Bucky says without removing his eyes from Steve.

“Uh, you gotta, just, I’ll explain it to you. I’ll explain it. Just open the circuit…”

Bucky grabs the dull gray metal box next to the laptop apparently running the thing and pulls it off the wall in a shower of sparks and wrenching metal.The forcefield immediately goes down.

“That’s one way to do it,” Stark says.

Steve strides past, shoulder checking Bucky as he does. “I thought you weren’t on active duty,” he says, bending down to retrieve his shield.

“Someone had to save your dumb ass,” Bucky replies. 

Probably wouldn’t have even been him if Fury had any agents to spare, but from what Bucky understands it’s hard to keep people on when what you’re known for is a) being dead, and b) being infiltrated by the exact force you were determined to exterminate. 

“Stark was working on getting us out,” Steve says, still tight-jawed.

Bucky looks at Stark, who doesn’t really look like he’s been working on anything other than a black eye. 

“Yeah, okay, asshole.We’ll talk about your death wish later,” Bucky says.

He'd been ready to leave it at that, but Steve immediately turns on him, broad shouldered and aggressive, so far into Bucky’s space already that Bucky can’t help but feel his hackles raise in response. “We’re going to talk? About _me_?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says.His blood rises easily, boiling under the attention.Their chests are only a couple inches apart.He can feel Steve’s temper like it’s his own.A heard of wild horses charging into the pale blue distance.Nowhere to go.“About your proclivity toward running into an assload of trouble without anyone to watch your six.”

“Hey,” says Stark.

“You can’t even watch your own ass, let alone someone else’s,” Bucky snaps in his direction. “Shut the hell up.”

Steve’s chest hits Bucky’s.The tac gear makes it impossible to feel anything but the solid force of it - not the outline of his uniform’s star, no punch from his heart.Bucky feels it anyway.

“ _You_ were supposed to be watching my six, Barnes,” he says. There’s no softness in his expression, but no real fury, either.Just ice. “It was supposed to be you.”

The world narrows down to Steve alone.The jut of his chin, the bow of his lips, the edge of his brow.How Bucky wakes sometimes in the night, his arms outstretched, his hands cupped around the invisible outline of that face, so much like the shape of the world if you didn’t know what he’d meant by it.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Clint says from the open doorway.Bucky pulls back from Steve with unnecessary force. “Our ride’s here, if anyone wants to leave.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, and he’s gone before Bucky can even start breathing again.

 

* * *

 

They ride back in silence the whole way, Stark alternately propped up against each of them until Clint snaps that they’re going to cause lasting damage pushing him back and forth like that and takes over.By the end of the flight, he looks about as exasperated as Bucky’s ever seen him, his expression hard enough to scare Pepper into thinking the worst when she comes out to the roof to help collect them.

“He’s fine, I’m just trying to keep him away from these idiots,” Clint says, scowling.Bucky’s never seen him so angry.Actually, maybe he’s never seen Clint angry, period.

“Heyyyy, Pep,” Stark drawls when he sees her, his lips curving into, what do you know, a real smile. 

“Come on, Tony,” Pepper says, smiling at Bucky so gratefully that he can’t help but feel supremely uncomfortable.She’s got her arm around Stark’s waist and her fingers pressed gently to his temple, her touch tender as a mother’s and full of care.

“Let’s get you a neuro exam,” Bucky hears her say as she draws him away.

“Anything, Pep,” comes Stark’s fading chirp. “Anything for you.” 

“You idiots need to get your shit together,” Clint says once they’re gone. 

Bucky pulls his attention away from where he’d been staring after Stark and Pepper, his gaze full of his own dazzled confusion, his vision smarting like they’d left a trail of will o’ wisps in their wake.

Steve, still iced over from the ride home, doesn’t look at either of them.He just squares his jaw and unclenches his fists and heads toward the door.

“Cap! We have to debrief!” Clint calls after him.

The door, one of Stark’s stupidly unsatisfying ones, compresses gently back into place without a sound. 

Yeah, Bucky knows that feeling.

 

* * *

 

Natasha accompanies him to the flower shop out of a sense of amusement rather than camaraderie.She’s just short of gleeful when the little bell over the door chimes their entrance, and Bucky figures this is part of his punishment for pissing Steve off.

See, he’s pissed Steve off before.More than once.It’s a thing they have. 

Usually this thing they have ends in Steve punching Bucky in the jaw.Then it’s over.They go about their lives.They carry on.Only this time, Steve didn’t punch him in the jaw, and they’re not carrying on.

“Hello there,” a matronly woman says, approaching from deep within the store.Bucky notes her gnarled red hands, her skin stretched shiny to accommodate her cheeky smile.“Can I help you two with anything?”

“No,” Bucky says at the same time Natasha bubbles, “Please!”

Apparently Natasha’s grin overrides Bucky’s scowl, because the woman folds her hands happily across her lap and says with a little shoulder hitch, “Anything you’re looking for in specific?”

“Well.” Natasha slings her arm around Bucky’s shoulders. “My friend here has been a complete idiot, and he needs something that says, ‘Sorry I’ve been an asshole for the last three months, the thing is, I actually love you.’”

Bucky rubs a hand over his face. “это пиздец.”

“Ah,” says the woman.She leads them to a sprig of yellow flowers that remind Bucky of sunlight.“How about a daffodil? They symbolize new beginnings.”

Touching the trumpet-like mouth of one of the flowers, Bucky regards it for a moment.He shakes his head.

“No?All right.You could go traditional. Roses are impossible to mistake.”

Natasha steps in when Bucky’s eyebrows knit.Her arm is still around his neck, reminding him of the days when he once did the same to a much smaller body.Steve, he thinks. _Steve._

“I don’t really think he’s a roses kind of fella, are you?” 

“Tulips? Hyacinth?” the woman suggests, a little helplessly.

But all those flowers don’t seem right, nor do any of the others the woman helpfully points out, her mood never flagging no matter how many Bucky rejects.Maybe this was a bad idea.Maybe it means that they aren’t meant to knit the rift Bucky has created. 

“Maybe you’re putting too much stock in signs and symbolism, James,” Natasha says, pinching him. “Just choose one you think he’ll like.”

Bucky thinks about the flush of Steve’s forget-me-nots, the delicate lace of them, their inherent loveliness.Steve had known Bucky would like them because he knew Bucky.

“What about this one?” he says, approaching a display of white flowers, star-shaped and bold at the base of multiple stamens that promise even more blooms. 

“That looks like a sprouting asparagus, Barnes,” Natasha says.

“It could work,” the woman answers gently, as though she’s more afraid of disagreeing with Natasha than she is interested building up Bucky’s confidence. “It’s called the Star of Bethlehem.”

He picks out a single plant.Though Natasha leaves before he can spend even more time agonizing over a pot, she gives his cheek a parting peck that Bucky hopes means she approves of the choice (despite its apparent asparagus-like qualities).

When he gets home, he stores the Star of Bethlehem on top of the fridge where the cat can’t get it - she’s been known to destroy things she suspects have a greater purpose, like the toaster - and opens the door to the spare room. 

Inside is the single box of possessions he’d accumulated during his thaw.

It takes him two hours to work up the courage to open it.

 

* * *

 

See, Bucky Barnes knows it when he’s fucked up regarding Steve Rogers.He’s done it enough times that the novelty of the feeling wore off long ago.If he steps backwards and looks at it, really _looks_ , he can almost always pinpoint the moment he went wrong.A lot of the time though, he doesn’t have to.Steve’s face is a dead giveaway when it comes to his feelings, and Bucky, he knows the second it happens.

He’s not sure, this time.Maybe Steve’s always looked at him like that, and Bucky just can’t remember.

Sometimes, Bucky’s not sure if the things he does remember about Steve are true or if they’re just dreams he had, once upon a time.

He takes the bus to DC because it’s rude to use company assets for personal reasons, especially when you’re not even officially part of the company. 

The ride gives him time to figure out what he’s going to say.Luckily, there aren’t a lot of options; Steve’s pretty simple, always has been, and what he requires is sincerity.So, Bucky works on his sincerity.

It’s not that he’s not sorry, just that maybe he’s sorry for the wrong things.He thinks again of Sam: his wide and easy smile, his calmness of character, his patience with Bucky’s sullen silence.What Bucky should be feeling is relief.What he should be feeling is joy.

Instead, what he feels has no name.It doesn’t exist in people who are people. And if Bucky Barnes still believed in God, or if God still believed in Bucky Barnes, it’d be Him who he’d be asking for forgiveness, not Steve.

Because the truth is, he’s not sorry.He’s loved Steve Rogers all his life, and he’ll continue to love him until the day he finally dies.Bucky may no longer bear Steve’s mark, but Steve still has his, and sure as hell it’ll be black as the day Bucky gave it to him for the rest of Steve’s life if Bucky has anything to say about it.

So, he works on his sincerity.

 

* * *

 

It’s early evening by the time Bucky arrives at Steve’s DC townhouse.He’s got the plant, and he’s got the file, and maybe he’s still working on his sincerity, but hell.It’s as good as it’s gonna get.

Bucky thinks he’s fully prepared himself for the eventuality of Sam answering the door, but what he’s not prepared for is the tiny Asian woman who does instead.She’s got her hair pulled half back and is wearing a white button up shirt that’s at least four sizes too large for her, and her slippers have little bunny rabbits on them.

“Uh, hi?” Bucky looks down the row of doors, each one the same, and mentally panics at the thought that he’d gotten the wrong one and now has no idea which one is actually Steve’s. “I’m looking for Steve Rogers.”

The lady gives him the up-and-down and cocks her head to the side, both seemingly curious and amused.She reminds him a little bit of Natasha. 

“Steve’s not here,” she says. 

“Babe! Who is it?” Someone - Sam - calls from within the house.

Bucky watches the woman’s expression shift from one of curiosity to fear, and realizes that his face has done a thing it hasn’t in awhile.Natasha calls it MurderFace, and it’s really, really difficult to take off once it’s on.

Not that Bucky can think of any reason he would want to take it off, just now.

Sam appears more quickly than Bucky expected and immediately pulls the door between Bucky and the woman, whose face appears under his armpit just a few seconds later.It’s not like the door would stop him, but then again, she’s not his target.

“Barnes,” Sam says, holding his hands up where Bucky can see them.His expression is concerned, which is not exactly the expression Bucky thinks he should be wearing at this moment in time. “JB, you okay, buddy?”

“I’ll be better after I rip your heart out and feed it to you,” Bucky says.

“Wow, good use of your words. Okay, Gigi?” That must be the woman. “How about you go finish dinner up while Barnes and I… talk.”

“Okay,” Gigi says, a little reluctantly. “But if he rips out your heart, I want to watch.”

“Please go into the kitchen,” Sam says through his teeth, not once taking his eyes from Bucky.

Gigi retreats.Bucky can barely hear her footfalls, they’re so soft.

Despite the fact that a few feet obviously won’t stop Bucky from anything if what he wants is something, Sam visibly relaxes when she’s gone.After that, he lets Bucky in and gestures to the small living room, where a well-worn couch is littered in blankets and throw pillows, and the large entertainment center is set up for a movie.

“Think you can tell me why we’re ripping my heart out?” Sam says after a few minutes of silence.He sits down, but doesn’t look surprised when Bucky stays standing.

“Steve,” is all Bucky says.

“Steve,” says Sam.

A few more minutes of taut silence.Bucky’s getting impatient.His hand is getting closer to his knife.He thinks maybe Steve will want to talk to Sam first, before Bucky slowly dismembers him piece by piece, but who knows when Steve will show up and Bucky forgot his phone at home, so he can’t call him and tell him to hurry up and get his ass here.

Where the hell is Steve, anyway? It’s past his bedtime.

The silence goes on too long.Bucky moves forward - just one long stride takes him to Sam’s position - and to Sam’s credit, he’s already up off his seat and ready when Bucky gets there.

It takes a second for both of them to realize that Bucky’s holding up Sam’s hand, the palm of which is the same spring green as Steve’s.Looks like therapy actually did have its uses, Bucky thinks distantly.

Sam seems to be thinking the same thing, because that little smile he gets when he’s proud of something Bucky’s done crawls onto his face and rests there until a very sudden, very real look of understanding replaces it.

“Oh,” he says. “Oh, shit. Barnes. No. _Really_?”

“What,” says Bucky.

“No, no, no, man, come on!”Sam pulls his wrist out of Bucky’s grasp that’s gone weak with confusion. “Are you kidding me? Me and Steve?”

The MurderFace does give way to existential crisis, apparently. 

The arm is unsettled and grinding. _Whir, whir, whir_.

“Dude. I like ladies, man. Only ladies.Not Steve’s geriatric lily-white ass, you have _got_ to be joking me.”

“But you have the marks,” Bucky says.

“Yeah, and?” Bucky’s mouth opens and nothing comes out.Sam’s expression softens and he says, “Sit down, Barnes.”

Bucky sits. 

“I’m gonna give you a crash course on the advances you missed in the field of Soulmate Theory, so buckle up.”

Gigi sits in for some of it, telling a story about one of the yellow marks on her arm before the kitchen timer goes off and drags her away.She shows Bucky the mark, mostly faded in the middle but stronger on the outline, and says she got it when she was eight years old from her first best friend, a girl who, as a young woman, slept with Gigi’s ex-husband.

“Yellow can mean happiness or optimism, but it can also mean dishonesty and betrayal.That was a lesson I had to learn in this lifetime, I guess.I’m still learning it, but it’s fading more and more each day, see?”

She brings them each a mug of strong tea, which Sam pushes far away from himself as soon as she’s gone back into the kitchen, sharing a look of affectionate disgust with Bucky.

“Green usually signifies renewal,” he says. “Or something like that, anyway.”

It’s more than an hour later and Bucky surfaces to Sam’s hand on his shoulder.

“You thought I was being philosophical when I asked you what you thought the black mark meant, huh?” he says, shaking his head sadly. “I’m sorry, Barnes.I should’ve pushed it.Guess I didn’t realize someone hadn’t thought to bring you up to speed.”

Bucky hasn’t said anything for awhile.His brain feels numb, but he can’t stop going over what Sam’s said like some kind of worry stone.All this time. All this fucking time, and he’d been mourning something that might not even be dead.

Some time later looks up from where his chin has been resting on his knees to find a plate of some kind of cake next to him on the couch.He’s not sure how much time he’s lost, but Sam is still sitting across from him, seemingly unbothered as he does a crossword puzzle. 

“What _does_ black mean?” he ventures.

Sam just shakes his head.“What do you think it means?”

Bucky huffs, snatching the plate of cake up off the couch and shoving a piece of it, almost all of it, really, in his mouth.

“I hate you.”

 

* * *

 

Sam had been reluctant to put him back on the bus - something about too much pathetic in such a small space being a hazard to the general population - but Bucky’s no idiot. He’d already interrupted Sam’s date night, and even though Gigi had basically strong-armed him into staying for dinner, he didn’t mean to crash on Sam’s couch and ruin their movie night, too.

So it’s past midnight when he gets home.So he’s exhausted. 

So Steve’s asleep on Bucky’s couch when he walks in.

“Shit,” he mutters.

It’s two seconds before Steve opens his eyes.That’s more than enough time for Bucky to take in the cat curled up on Steve’s head, the open book flat against Steve’s chest.His feet are crossed and bare.The TV’s on and muted.He’s made himself dinner.

Rude.

“That’s mine,” Bucky manages, unsure of whether he’s talking about the cat or the book or the food or Steve. 

He sets the Star of Bethlehem on the small table by the door, where he usually puts his knives, and watches Steve wake up by parts, just as he’d done when they were kids, and teenagers, and soldiers.

“Hey, Buck,” Steve says, upsetting the cat and the book as he sits up a bit to rub at his eyes. Sam—“

“—texted you, yeah, I know,” Bucky grunts.Gigi thought she was distracting him while Sam typed away on his phone, but Bucky’s got more training than shit’s got flies, and if he couldn’t notice one idiot texting another, he’d probably be dead a thousand times over by now.“Guy’s an asshole.”

“Buck,” Steve says.There’s a gentle reprimand in his voice, but it sounds affectionate, too. Steve’s all sleep soft and rumpled, bleary-eyed and tired, but he’s sharp in the way that Steve is always sharp, and he doesn’t sound mad.Panic seizes Bucky about the heart, a clenched fist.

“I, um.Been operating under bad intel,” Bucky says. 

He tucks a strand of hair behind one ear, unsure of what to do with his hands.They, his hands, want something.To be fists, maybe—to be clenched fists.

Everything about him is a clenched fist.

There is a moment where Steve is on the couch, and the cat is kneading his chest, and his feet are bare and crossed, and then that moment is gone.Because Steve’s standing in front of him.His shirt is too tight. The cat is a pleased rumble between them.

“Still taking all that stupid around with you, huh? I kind of figured.You’ve been carrying it since the war,” Steve says.

“I’ve been carrying a lot of shit since the war, pal,” Bucky says, letting out a trembling sigh; itfeels like something else escapes, something more than just air.Whatever it is, he’s held onto it for so long, a part of him can’t help but want it back.“They took away all the good bits and replaced ‘em with something no one else in the world should have to pick up.”

“No, they didn’t.They made you think they did, but they couldn’t.” 

The cat slips from Steve’s hands, lands on the floor with a muffled thud where she weaves a figure eight between them, something like predestination.

And Bucky tries, he tries real hard to step back before Steve gets to him, but either he doesn’t really want to or Steve has more on him than he remembers from Project Insight, because Steve’s thumb is on his jaw, and his fingers are in his hair, and Bucky knows what’s going to happen before it does, and sure.

Sure, he leans forward and kisses Steve.And Steve kisses him back.

Something sweet blooms in Bucky’s chest, like a clenched fist unfurling.

“Steve,” he whispers, but Steve doesn’t stop kissing him. 

Slowly, Bucky brings his right hand up to touch Steve’s chest, his fingertips landing on the dip in Steve’s clavicle.He can feel Steve’s heart beating there, a familiar flutter of a tattoo against his fingers that Bucky had once ascribed to sickness but is now forced to admit is because of him.

He pulls back.

“I don’t have it anymore, Stevie.It’s just metal and clockwork now,” he says, brushing the fingers of the metal arm over Steve’s elbow, surprised to find that even it wants what he wants, despite the words leaving his mouth.

Steve just looks at him.Runs his eyes all over Bucky’s face, mapping it like one of Stark’s robots.He says, “Come on.” 

He takes Bucky’s hand - slides his fingers between the metal ones, pulls Bucky down past the aloe and the English ivy, beyond the bamboo palm and through the philodendron that is so overgrown it’s made a cave of the hallway.They end up in the bathroom with Bucky in front of the mirror, Steve situated behind him.

“Oh,” says Bucky.

The new mark is just a brush of white against his jaw, a petal-shaped stroke beneath his ear.It’s bold and pure beside the others - Natasha’s, the navy blue of which had begun to fade after their latest coffee date; and Stark’s, now a rose-colored flush that Bucky had watched recede in Stark’s bathroom, his fingers still greasy from the Chinese food they’d eaten not long before.

He has Steve turned around and the back of his shirt yanked down before Steve’s startled “Hey!” can even make it past his lips. 

“It’s gone,” he says, almost an accusation.

“Yeah,” Steve replies.He looks sheepish when he turns back around, but his voice is full of something warm and soft, like a nice bed or the petals of a flower left sitting in the sun.“Has been for awhile.It disappeared once I realized who you were, back in DC.”

Bucky’s eyebrows knit.He goes away into his head. “But I saw—”

“It must’ve been a memory.”

“I guess the Winter Soldier had a thing or two to teach your stupid mug, after all.”

Steve pulls a face, and Bucky smiles, his lips curling like they used to.

“Don’t know why it disappeared without a trace, though.” His eyes drop to Steve’s clavicle. “Never heard of anyone getting a new one from the same person, neither.” 

“I hate to tell you this, Buck,” Steve says, sliding his hands over the small of Bucky’s back, and _oh_. Oh, Bucky thinks. This is what that feels like. “But there are a lot of things you’ve never heard of.”

“That a promise?” Bucky asks.He can feel his body pulsing with light, like something’s finally let go, like part of him has finally been freed.

“You bet your ass it is,” Steve says. 

Bucky kisses him again.

 

* * *

 

The arm breaks.Stark fixes it. 

Steve comes with.

“I am hugely offended,” Stark says when he sees what’s become of the mark he’d given Bucky.Still there, still faded.

“What can I say?” Bucky says, glancing at Steve.His voice is a drawl, his tone practiced and wry.Steve has this sharp, brand new smile on his face, so shiny it’s like he’s been waiting to pull it out all this time. “Maybe my soul’s just closer to ascension.” 

Stark rolls his eyes so far back in his head Bucky’s surprised he doesn’t fall over.The mark on Stark’s arm is still there, too, bold as the day it appeared, just like all the others Bucky had seen littered all over his body. 

Looks like it’ll take Stark a few more lifetimes to catch a clue, but Bucky.Bucky guesses he’s lucky.

“So,” he says. “About that arm you said you could build me…”

 

* * *

 

 

“This is embarrassing.” 

They’re at the mall, expertly avoiding the seemingly unending stream of teenagers cascading through the breezeway, sucking on orange juliuses and shooting the shit.Natasha’s eyes are on Bucky’s jaw and she’s wearing that little smile she gets whenever she’s around him, like she knows something about him he doesn’t. She probably does.

“What is?” Bucky says, waiting for it.

Natasha elbows him, speaking through a mouthful of smoothie. “You look like you have jizz on your face.” 

Bucky laughs and laughs.

Yeah.Everything’s fine.

 

* * *

 

“Hey, Buck?”

“Yeah, pal.”

“This cat have a name?”

“Rogers, shit.I don’t even know where that cat came from.”

**Author's Note:**

> kthxbai.


End file.
